How Building a Saudi City Made a Lefty Out
of Dick Underhill, VFPby Greg Moses
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 10, 2005

Back
in the ‘60s you could say two things about Navy and Air Force veteran Dick
Underhill: he liked to do the work that nobody else wanted to do, and he
was a Goldwater Republican. Today as Underhill shuttles in and out of
Crawford, Texas, running supplies and tending to lists of things to do in
support of Cindy Sheehan, you could still say he likes to do the work that
nobody else wants to do, but you couldn’t call him a Goldwater Republican
anymore.

“You have heard about PTSD, haven’t you?”
asks Underhill in a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon from his Austin
home. “That’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Well, I have a name for
something else that I call PASD. That’s Post Awareness Stress Disorder.
It’s what happens to you when you’ve been raised all your life to believe
the story that the slaveholders and merchant pirates who founded the USA
were good people and that the government of the USA is the best in the
world. When you find out that’s not true at all, it does leave you under
stress.”

The foundation of Underhill’s Goldwater
Republicanism was an economic conviction born out of his background as a
working class juvenile delinquent who made something good of his life.
Anybody, said that conviction, can pick themselves up by their own
bootstraps no matter what. If Underhill had done it, so could everyone
else.

But the foundation of Underhill’s economic
conviction began to crack during the seven years (1978-85) that he spent
working for the Parsons Corporation building the Saudi Arabian city of
Yanbu from the ground up. Since he was single at the time he could travel
quite a bit, so he saw the worlds of Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle
East. Whenever he saw extreme poverty, he heard the same formula for
economic opportunity: get access to USA markets. But that wasn’t quite the
bootstrap of his convictions, so he began to question his economic
theories.

In Tucson during the 1990s Underhill began
taking lots of courses at the community college and University of Arizona,
where he learned how to outgrow his childhood textbooks. He remembers
especially two courses on Latin American history. In part one, “the
Spanish are the bad guys you know,” says Underhill. “But in the second
part I found out what the government of the USA did.” He learned what
happened to Allende in Chile and the usual list of things like that. “It
destroyed my vision of what I thought we were like.”

At about the same time, Underhill started
going to weekly Peace and Justice vigils in Tucson. He recalls that the
vigils were originally called to protest conditions that produced illegal
immigrants from Central and South America, but the vigils adapted to
changing issues. At the vigils he met some folks from Veterans for Peace.
“One thing I have noticed,” says Underhill. “If you are in a group that is
predominately pro-peace, ask how many have lived or worked outside the US.
Four and Five Star package tours don’t count. My experience is that 70
percent will identify themselves as having lived abroad.”

Now we fast forward to Austin, where
Underhill moved to “follow the money” which is his way of joking that his
wife found work there, so he came with her. About three years ago, he
watched a film about the USA invasion of Panama.

“In my mind the invasion of Panama involved
a few helicopters. Our guys chased Noriega into a building and they played
loud music until he came out. Then we hauled him off and threw him in
prison forever. But I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.” In
the film he saw a story of an illegal invasion in which thousands of
civilians were killed, thousands more displaced, entire apartment
complexes burned, all in the name of a “drug war.” For Underhill the film
portrayed a military preparation for the invasion of Iraq, a proving
ground for war technologies such as the newly made stealth bomber. And all
of it neatly tucked behind glossy media management so that Americans could
coast along on the lie.

“I saw that film three years ago,” says
Underhill, “and I haven’t been off the cell phone since.” Which brings us
back to the Dick Underhill who likes to do the things that others don’t.
For the past three years, Underhill’s cell phone has been ringing with
movement business. If a bus is coming to town on a national tour. If a
speaker needs a place to stay. All those things that need doing, Underhill
tries to get them done. And although Underhill is very active in the
Austin chapter of VFP, he had nothing to do with a national office
decision to bring the 20th annual VFP convention to Dallas. That decision
had more to do with a need to rotate regions and, oh yes, the fact that
George Bush lived here (”for tax purposes,” quips Underhill, “because
Texas has no state income tax”) and kept a summer home nearby.

About 100 days before the convention was to
open near Dallas, Underhill was asked to take over the work of
coordinating all the details. How much time did he put into that job? “I
worked as long as I could stay awake,” says Underhill. One detail, as we
know, was to invite Cindy Sheehan to speak. “I had quite accidentally run
across someone who recommended Cindy,” recalls Underhill. “So we tied that
up, but no one knew about her plans to visit Crawford until the day before
she arrived at the convention. As soon as I got her email about it, the
first thing I did was to contact the Crawford Peace House and ask them to
get ready.”

The Crawford Peace House was set up by a
farsighted peace activist from Dallas named Johnny Wolf. He purchased the
building in the Spring of 2003 for just this kind of eventuality. He knew
the Crawford Ranch would draw activists, and he wanted a watering hole for
them to stop at along the way. “We’re not going to let them turn the town
into a three-ring circus,” said Crawford Mayor Robert Campbell to the
Dallas Morning News when the news of the Crawford Peace House was
announced. “If they want to protest, let them go to Washington.”

That was long before Cindy Sheehan made up
her mind to find out where Crawford was so that she could confront the
president of the USA at his summer home and tell him to stop using the
deaths of soldiers like her son to justify further war in Iraq.

There were some folks who encouraged
Underhill to move the entire VFP convention to Crawford at the last
minute, but he reminded them that Crawford was not an easy place for lots
of people to eat on short notice. “There’s only one blinking light in that
town,” says Underhill, “and it’s about eight times brighter than the
President.” So the VFP worked out a caravan that would be led by an
Impeachment Tour Bus. A couple veterans stayed with Sheehan in Crawford,
and you’ve probably heard what happened next.

What you don’t see so much in the tip of the
tremendous iceberg that Cindy Sheehan has thrown in front of the
President’s war cruiser is the long years of preparation, the weekly
vigils in Tucson, the courses in history, the film festivals, the fund
drives, the chores and newsletters that finally fuse enough people
together that they can move in under Cindy Sheehan and make sure she stays
afloat as long as it takes.

Even Underhill thought the scene looked
pretty desolate when he passed through Crawford Sunday afternoon (was that
just two days ago?) and saw this one lonely tent pitched against the Texas
prairie. Although by that point Underhill knew that the Crawford Peace
House had thrown open its doors and CodePink had mobilized its network,
“It didn’t look too powerful.”

“But you know what?” says Underhill, pausing
for a while at home between his support trips to Crawford. “I think this
has shaken the whole globe. I have a friend in Germany and he says it’s on
television there. This has blown wide open.” Tuesday morning campers
watched ABC camera crews hang through the rain to get dawn shots for the
evening news. Something about Cindy Sheehan is bringing out the poetry in
everyone’s imagination.

“And you know if we had anybody else out
there, nobody would care,” he says. “This is all about Cindy.” And Cindy
is all about Casey (May 29 1979-April 4 2004). Not in his name, Mr.
President. Not. In. His. Name.